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By Threat Research Team
Welcome back to our series on the evolution of scalper bots. So far, we have traced scalping from its early ticket resale roots to the rise of automated bots. We have explored the ongoing battle between bot developers and anti-bot defenses and examined how scalping evolved into a professionalized, multi-million-dollar industry. In our last post, we uncovered a hidden sub-market where traders aggressively bought, sold, and exchanged bot licenses just like the products they acquired.
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By Alex McConnell
According to the British Retail Consortium (BRC), shoplifting in the UK is surging. Reported cases jumped from 3.7 million to 20.4 million within a year. Viral social media clips show brazen daylight shoplifting. Reports quote frustrated shopkeepers afraid to intervene. Experts in retail, law, and economics debate the causes, blaming the economy, policing, organized crime, and justice systems. While physical shoplifting dominates headlines, digital shoplifting is equally bold and costly.
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By Alex McConnell
If you’re looking for a quick way to block bots with robots.txt, you may be disappointed to learn that it’s not as effective as many people think. Robots.txt is often discussed as a simple solution for controlling crawler traffic, but in reality, it provides very limited protection.
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By Alex McConnell
A strong reputation is vital for business success, influencing customer loyalty and spending decisions. When a brand’s reputation is damaged, customers often turn to competitors, which can reduce key metrics like lifetime customer value. Trust is central to a brand’s reputation. Customers expect their personal data to be secure, pricing to be fair, and services to be reliable. However, bot attacks undermine this trust.
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By Alex McConnell
Open-source security frameworks are an essential tool in the cybersecurity arsenal. These frameworks provide the foundation for building secure systems and adhering to key industry standards. Yet, despite their importance, many practitioners and organizations fail to tap into the full potential of these frameworks. Exploring them in depth can unlock significant value for businesses, developers, and security teams.
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By Alex McConnell
In 2020, scalper bots made headlines by hoarding PlayStation 5 consoles. Lockdowns and online-only sales allowed bots to dominate the market, leaving frustrated consumers empty-handed. Today, scalper bots are even more dangerous. Criminal groups behind these operations have evolved. They are organized, professional, and focused on more sustainable targets: low-value items in massive quantities.
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By Alex McConnell
The battle between bots and anti-bot tools is a relentless arms race. Bot operators constantly develop new ways to outsmart defenses, and defenders adapt to counter those tactics. As one side evolves, the other quickly follows suit. This ongoing conflict has grown more intricate over the years. Initially, bots mimicked traits like browsers, IPs, user agents, and mouse and keyboard inputs used by human visitors. These tricks sufficed to bypass primitive defenses.
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By Alex McConnell
Since the early days of the World Wide Web, automated scripts known as bots have been crawling cyberspace, collecting data for various purposes. Initially, these bots were designed to be helpful, cataloging information much like search engines such as Google and Bing do today. However, the volume of automated requests has grown significantly. Today, bots account for a substantial portion of web traffic, costing businesses considerable resources to handle unwanted or malicious requests.
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By Threat Research Team
Welcome back to The Evolution of Scalper Bots series. In our previous blog, we analyzed the rise of professional scalper bot ecosystems. This included cook groups, bots-as-a-service platforms, and retail scalping’s emergence. As technical advancements drove fierce competition, we unraveled the complex dynamics of this controversial industry.
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By Alex McConnell
As Black Friday approaches, retailers are gearing up for the inevitable surge in online traffic. But cybercriminals are also preparing for this high-stakes season, fine-tuning their bot attack strategies to exploit inventory, pricing, and customer accounts. To shed light on these threats and what retailers can do to prepare, we consulted five experts from Netacea who shared their insights on the bot attack landscape during Black Friday and beyond.
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By Netacea
Business logic attacks are becoming more sophisticated as criminals invest time and effort into learning how their target websites, apps and APIs work. Many bot management solutions encourage cybersecurity and anti-fraud professionals to focus only on the execution phase of an attack when bots are active on a website, but there are several other phases that provide opportunity for disruption of an attack before this point.
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By Netacea
In this episode of the Cybersecurity Sessions, Andy Ash speaks with Simon Brownhill, a cybersecurity leader with a military background. Simon shares his journey from Navy weapons engineer to CISO, offering insights on leadership, risk management, and security culture. They discuss AI’s impact on cybersecurity, balancing innovation with risk, and the importance of mentorship. Simon highlights the need for proactive security, hands-on learning, and effective board communication.
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By Netacea
In 2019 we saw more credential stuffing, sniper and scraper bot attacks targeting websites, mobile apps and APIs alike. The shift in attack vectors and scale of attacks highlights an urgent need for a sophisticated solution that protects businesses and customers from the growing malicious bot threat. Understanding the intent of bad bots vs. humans or good bots is vital as all industries face new challenges in acquiring the necessary visibility of their traffic, and subsequent analysis required for rapid and effective attack response that doesn't sacrifice the user experience.
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By Netacea
Are you seeing the full picture when it comes to web and application security? Without fast and accurate data at your fingertips from the best bot management, it's increasingly difficult to differentiate human from automated bot traffic on your web-facing applications. Credential stuffing, account fraud and scraping attacks are a multi-billion-dollar business¹, with the scope for earning made increasingly simple by the vast number of internet users, availability of login credentials and the sheer volume of connected devices.
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By Netacea
The second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) is a data-driven legislation introduced by the European Union (EU) in 2015, with which all payment service providers (PSPs) throughout the EU and beyond must comply. PSD2 expands the scope of 2007's PSD, a directive implemented to make payments across borders as easy, secure and inexpensive as domestic payments. However, a short eight years later, innovations in technology and the prevalence of fintech have created new challenges for the payments industry to address.
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By Netacea
Web traffic is made up of human and non-human visitors, but not all these sources are safe. Sophisticated bot traffic is on the rise and it is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate the criminal from real customers. Download your free copy of 'The Managing and Mitigating Bots' Guide and learn about.
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By Netacea
In 2017 Black Friday was the single largest cause of web traffic peaks and website outages in the retail industry. Even a 1-second delay in load time can result in a 7% loss in conversions.
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Netacea provides a revolutionary bot management solution that protects websites, mobile apps and APIs from malicious attacks such as scraping, credential stuffing and account takeover.
Our Intent Analytics™ engine, powered by machine learning, quickly and accurately distinguishes bots from humans to protect websites, mobile apps and APIs from automated threats while prioritising genuine users. Actionable intelligence with data-rich visualisations empowers you to make informed decisions about your traffic.
We Prevent Sophisticated Automated Threats:
- Account Takeover: Stop account takeover by identifying account-based attacks.
- Credential Stuffing: Prevent data breaches and protect your website from credential stuffing attacks.
- Fake Account Creation: Prevent fake account fraud by identifying bot accounts, fake account creation and mass account registration.
- Web Scraping: Identify and block web scrapers and scraping attacks made to compromise your website.
- Ad/Click Fraud: Identify ad fraud to reduce wasted spend and prevent ad bots from illegitimately displaying or accessing ads.
- Skewed Marketing Analytics: Prevent bots from stealing your marketing budget and skewing your analytics.
A Smarter Approach to Bot Management.